


between the heaves of storm

by formerly_known_as___REDACTED



Category: The Turning (2020)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Background Character Death, Consensual Underage Sex, Crying, Cunnilingus, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Epistolary, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Murder, My First Work in This Fandom, Nostalgia, Not Suitable/Safe For Work, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Second Person, Present Tense, Reader-Insert, Sibling Incest, Work In Progress, adopted!reader
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:06:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24066313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerly_known_as___REDACTED/pseuds/formerly_known_as___REDACTED
Summary: It is not appropriate for children of your age to share a bed.Gross old Mrs. Grose, her voice echoing in your memory, wearing her disdain and clutching her pearls and narrowing her eyes and making mountains out of molehills.Miles, you know better, and with your breeding it falls toyouto lead by example.(Characters are 17)
Relationships: Miles Fairchild/Reader
Comments: 46
Kudos: 94





	1. origami boy

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by ["FEELINGS"](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/617563) by mxmtrashmouth. 



"Hey."

You startle out of a thin doze.

"Bad dreams?"

The window's open, curtains thrashing inward on gusts of rain. Lightning flashes stutter up the inside of the room.

"Miles." You yawn and stretch your legs until they quiver. "Would you please shut the window?" You turn the pillow over to the cool side. "Please?"

"Of course."

He muscles down the sash and it rattles home with a heavy thud, mutes a boom of thunder. "Is that better?"

"Yes."

"Too bad, in a way." Miles sits on the edge of the bed and you feel his shrug, his hands digging restlessly into the blankets. "The storm, it's bringing cooler air."

"It's also bringing wetter air, all over my floor."

He laughs.

You roll onto your back. "I don't remember opening the window."

"Maybe you didn't."

More lightning comes, fills the room with its harsh yet fitful glare; Miles watches you, eyes dilated black and his hair a mess, his narrow shoulders hunched, the thin cotton of his PJs rumpled all over, those long white fingers bunched tight around your blankets, and inside the unstable light it's easy to remember him the way he was when you first saw him: ten years old with huge waif eyes and bird wrists and haphazard freckles and that thicket of hair refusing to behave. 

How Mrs. Fairchild--- _Mother_ \---fell in love with your dark eyes and black hair, your lightheaded paleness, your grief-fed thinness, the watery memories you had of your own mother and father before a house fire consumed them and dumped you in a foster home, before the kindnesses of your social worker and the blade of your mind carved out a place for you at the state's most elite day school; it's the story of how Mother became _your_ mother, her wild devotion to the idea that you were a twin somehow gifted to her through an unfortunate’s body, Miles's match, a dark miracle built just for her---the sort of belief only a born-rich woman would cling to, could cherish, without irony or malice. 

She passed her anxious, fractious love on to her son and he was an obedient boy, back then. He took it and took it.

That same year, she'd get pregnant with Flora.

You sit up. "Have you checked on Flora?"

"She's sleeping like a baby." Miles looks out the window, waves a languid hand. Shadows flicker along the sharp edges of his profile. "She never even notices the thunder."

You snort.

He turns, looks at you. Grins. "But you always do."

"Was I dreaming?"

"I think so. Push over."

You scooch away from the lingering heat of your own body and Miles climbs in, burrows under a pile of your blankets. He curls up, bunches your spare pillow underneath his cheek.

"You were, like...groaning and stuff." He sighs, shivers a little; he's always cold. "I could hear you." He closes his eyes. "Out in the hall."

You look at the windows. "They said it was a lightning strike, but I don't remember."

"The fire, you mean?" His eyes open. His voice quiets. "Your birth parents?"

You nod. "But I don't remember."

He unfolds a hand, finds one of yours. He laces your fingers together. "It's probably better that way."

You squeeze his chilly knuckles. "Probably."

Silence wells up. There's the wet rhythm of his breath, rain whipping the glass. Heat builds in the space between your palms. Somewhere near the house a tree screams at the invading wind, turns its branches into vocal chords, a whole world churning around it like the not-too-distant sea. A blast of wind crashes into the house. The window panes rattle.

Your face gets hot. The familiar hitches in his throat, the sound of his sleep engine starting and then stopping again, makes your top lip sweat and your scalp feel funny; it’s as if you might suddenly drop out of this moment, your body committing a disorienting plunge into a new realm where comfort and familiarity trade themselves in for burning skin and too-tight lungs and a belly full of butterflies. 

You close your eyes. 

Your thoughts float. 

Your skin drifts toward memory.

 _It is not appropriate for children of your age to share a bed._

Gross old Mrs. Grose, her voice echoing in your memory, wearing her disdain and clutching her pearls and narrowing her eyes and making mountains out of molehills. 

_Miles, you know better, and with your breeding it falls to_ you _to lead by example_. 

Branded a slut at the age of twelve, her eyes told you it was true every time you wore summer clothes or laughed too loud or sat on Miles's bed in the soft evening or kissed his cheek. Dared to hold his hand.

 _But she's still a Fairchild_ . Miles defended you every time she curled her lip and looked down her nose. He balanced up on his toes, this was back when he was too young to be tall and his whole body thrummed with it; he breathed it into her wrinkly old pouch face: _so back off_.

 _And our mother wanted us this way_ , you added once, just once, your voice shrill and cracking in the two-month doldrums between your thirteenth birthday and his; _she wanted us to be close, she_ wanted _us to have each other's backs always...like twins, and you being all like this about it doesn't change a THING_

\---but

(and here is where you take a single deep breath)

You wonder, on this insufferable summer night, on your back, lying so still you cannot feel the boundaries of your body, that particular runaway heat creeping up beneath your hair roots and down beneath your neckline, if your mother might've foreseen it---this heat and the pulse that comes with it. If she _should_ have. This dryness taking root in your tongue, your hand cupped around your brother's--- _your twin's_ \---idle hand, his idle breath leaning into your cheek, a trembling thirst in your mouth that could never be quenched with water.

"Hey." Miles stirs up and out of sleep, buries his face in your neck. "You're warm," he whispers.

"That's because it's summer," you whisper back.

He lets go of your hand, slides his arm around your waist. "Hug," he whines.

"You think Mrs. Grose opened the window?"

"Maybe." He shrugs. “Who cares." He rests his cheek on your chest. "Hug me.”

You put your arms around him. Even now, so much closer to adulthood, he’s still so thin, his long body all floppy angles strung together with muscles tight as garroting wire. He drapes a thigh over yours. His smooth skin wafts heat; he pulls the sweat out of you wherever he touches, despite his endless shivering.

“Hey.” Miles murmurs your name. “You sure you're okay?” He looks up. “Cause your heart is beating like crazy.”

“Yes,” you half-whisper. “I’m okay.”

“Is it the storm?”

“No.”

He props himself up on one arm. The storm lends its shuttering light, weakening now as it recedes; it strobes the rise and fall of your unfettered breasts, the way they slide away from each other underneath your silk slip. 

He slides a hand up over your sternum. You struggle to control your breath. One long sinewy finger traces the pink blotches blooming above your neckline.

He lifts his eyebrows. “Wow.”

“You’re…” Your cheeks burn. “That’s just making it worse.”

“Why?” His forehead creases. He shakes his head. “How?”

“You touching me like that, it’s freaking my body out…” You push his hand off, pull the sheet up over your chest. “My skin isn’t used to it.”

He laughs. “You say that like your skin has its own mind or something.”

"Doesn't it?"

"Mine doesn't."

You roll your eyes. "It's called autonomic response, Miles."

He rolls his eyes too and purses his lips and makes an exaggerated la-de-da face, mouths the words _autonomic response_.

"No, really." You hit his shoulder. "You can't control stuff like shivering or goosebumps, it's an autonomic reaction to stimuli."

"Well.” He flops onto his back. “Looks like _someone_ got better science grades than me."

"Well looks like _someone's_ science grades couldn't have been _too_ bad," you say, jabbing a finger into his upper arm, "if they understood everything I just said."

His head turns. "That,” he says, grinning, “is a fair point."

“Hey.” You face him. “Remember…” 

You reach out. He watches your hand move closer, a corner of his mouth twitching in and out of a half-smile. You glance at his face, curl your fingers. 

His eyebrows knot. "What are you…?"

You skim your nails down the length of his arm. 

His eyes meet yours.

"Scritches," you half-whisper. "Remember those?"

“Yeah, I remember." He rubs the bristling hairs on his forearm. He's still laughing. "But I’ve got more arm hair than you now and it’s tickly, so it’s not fair.”

“The trick is to hold still and take it. Or it used to be, at least.”

“Hey!”

“And you used to be better at it than this.”

“Body hair, I'm telling you.” He tucks his hands beneath his cheek. “You have a distinct advantage over me.”

“I have body hair, Miles.”

"Yeah, sure you do." He pushes his forearm toward your face. “But not as much as me, so there.”

“I hope not.”

He laughs.

"Do you remember the point of scritches?"

He shrugs. "Because we couldn't sleep and got bored?"

"Maybe. It was comforting."

“How ‘bout you turn over and I give you some scritches?” He grins, bites his lip, watches your face. “I mean…” He shrugs. “It always put you back to sleep.”

“Um...okay.”

“Turn around.”

You wrestle free your pile of loose hair, turn onto your belly. 

Miles straddles the backs of your knees.

You lift your hair off your back, push it up onto the pillow.

The mattress springs pop and sing at the shifting of his weight. He grasps bunches of your nightgown, works the silk up to your belly and past your ribs and the effort of it, the soft grunts digging into his breath-cadence, the places where he holds in air until it stutters before letting it spill all out in a rush, digs deep into your tightening guts. 

He struggles the nightgown off you. Cooler air rushes in, kisses where fabric had been. 

You shiver.

Slowly, lightly, he balances on his knees and runs his nails down your back. You let out a little gasp, the tiny muscles along your spine twitching in his wake until your shoulder blades spasm toward each other and your hips jerk.

“Wow, hello.” He cackles. “But you’re supposed to take it, remember?” 

A slow heavy thud of blood builds up---you think _down there, in the pit of your belly, in your womanhood, in your sex_ oh jesus fucking christ it’s your _pussy,_ your _cunt,_ your _clit---_ your insides clench but it’s sweet, a hot flutter, a ripple of honey, a clutch of smoldering sparks.

His tone gains a taunting, crackling edge. “Remember?” 

There’s more lightning somewhere, on the outside of you, and it flashes red through your lids. You grip the pillow, breathe through your mouth. Miles skims his nails close to your flank, carries a chuckle in his voice. 

“I’m pretty sure you used to be better at it, too.”

You cry out, muffle it with your pillow. Your shoulders twist and your back tenses until your breath explodes, a galloping shudder that thrashes down through your legs.

“That’s okay, don’t worry,” he half-whispers, leaning over you and dropping his weight. His groin cups your ass, his long narrow thighs squeeze you from hips to ribs. He presses down on the backs of your shoulders with a forearm. “I can keep you still.”

He trails a hand, uses his nails to skim the spaces between your ribs. 

Your spine struggles to twist, your ass shoving up into him, half-laughing and half-crying yourself into a full-throated moan; he grips you with his thighs, those garroting-wire muscles vicious. He’s hard, you feel it, the length of his cock hot and throbbing and trapped between one sharp hipbone and the curve of your ass. He tightens his thighs until the meat of your own thighs clamps down on your pussy. Sharp pleasure skewers up into your guts. You squirm.

He breathes through his teeth, shoves you down.

You gasp.

The cords in his forearm flex against the base of your neck. He breathes into your hair, the erratic puffs of it loud as the wind.

A boom of thunder rattles the window. 

You whimper. 

Every exhale scrapes through his voice, draws up a quick thin ragged whimpering note. He’s trembling.

“Miles.” Your voice an ache.

The sound of his name jerks his hips. He makes an agonized sound you’ve never heard before, deep and smoky and raw. 

“Someone could come in,” you whisper. “Th-Think of how it...might look.”

“But...I want you!” It bursts out of him in a petulant, breathless, cracked rush. 

“Flora.” Your heartbeat rattles into your voice. “What if she wakes up?”

“So what if she does?” He’s close to crying.

“The door isn’t locked.” You pull in a breath. “It isn’t even closed,” you whisper.

Miles shoves himself off you and the mattress bounces, his bare feet slapping the floor; his breathing jigs and jags. He slams the door. 

You flinch. 

He twists the bolt. It strikes home, metal on metal, loud and vulgar in the stillness as a gunshot.

 _Or a whip-crack_.

You turn onto your back. Open your eyes. Stare at the ceiling. A constant flicker of shadows comes and goes, flows through light fixtures and across crown molding; the old storm has perished, rolled on, but there’s a new one brewing. The atmosphere over the water is restless, it swells things. Wind weaves itself around the house, rattles things in familiar ways. 

_The Maine sea air is moody and cold, especially at night_ . Your eyes chase the shadows. _It’s like a tantrum---a wet rage---when there's no sun, when it can't stack up its white layers of haze between you and the sky_. 

You turn your head. Miles is huddled by the door. Folded in, loose in the joints but tight everywhere else, shaking all over, his disturbed tension a fine oscillating tremble that resonates throughout the lengths of his body; that’s Miles, he was always like this, even in his early boyhood: for all his rowdiness and recklessness, his learned imperiousness, underneath lives a lingering porcelain temperament longing to crack. His fragile elegance has always been strung too tight, his well-water eyes and pale skin and overripe mouth guileless as a plucked string. His pajamas glow in the dim shadow, ghostlike.

You sit up. A voice loosens from your memories, drifts up: _He’s too much like his mother_. Quint, he's dead now but he was so harsh, a brutal teacher, unsuitable in every way to instruct children---but it was your mother, Mrs. Fairchild, who had a soft spot for him, who couldn’t bear to deny her own urges toward tenderness. Mother, who believed in rehabilitation with the fervor other people reserved for God---she would open her arms and her purse for anyone, soft as sugar before a string of hardships, a plaintive voice, a faceful of tears.

You climb out of bed. 

Thunder mutters outside the window.

Miles grabs his face with both hands, flattens his mouth into a trembling line and you see his composure first flicker and then break, a fine shattering, and you remember Quint in the stables, how you overheard him speaking to Mr. Fairchild: _He’s overbred, too much like the mother’s side, a soft and tender boy. He’s in his head too much. But that’s okay, don’t worry. I’ll callus him up for you, sir._ Mr. Fairchild, a father-shaped presence you knew but only glimpsed. _You can put your bets on that_.

“Miles.” You move closer, keep a watch on the trembling twist in his mouth. “Shhhh.”

He bangs the back of his head against the door. Bares his teeth. Digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. Utters a strangled whimper.

A gust of rain slaps the glass.

"Shhhh." You put your hands on his hair. “That’s enough.”

Tears drip off his wrists. “I love you,” he sobs.

Lightning flashes, illuminates the outline of his red and swollen mouth.

“I know.” You wipe the snot off his top lip. “I love you, too.”

He pulls in a wrecked breath. “I’m sorry.”

“Shhhh.”

“I-I’m sorry." He gulps. "F-For...”

You wipe tears out of the hollows beneath his eyes.

“Holding you down like that, I…” His Adam's apple struggles. “I d-didn’t mean…"

You lift up on your toes, kiss the wet salty crest of one cheekbone. You kiss the other.

"I-I don’t want…”

You cup the back of his neck. 

"I…" He squeezes his eyes shut. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

You lean in, press a gentle kiss between his eyebrows. “You didn’t.”

His hands drop. His chest heaves.

“Hug me,” you whisper.

His arms go around you, his big hands spreading to follow the sway of your spine, the shift and float of your shoulder blades. He caresses the inward curve of your waist, buries his wet face in your neck. He sighs. 

“I love you,” you whisper.

His fingers twitch, hands squeezing your hips. The steady taut vibration of him deepens into a shudder, slows the rhythm of his breath. He moves his cheek against yours like an animal would.

“Kiss me,” you whisper.

He kisses your temple, your cheek, your hairline; his lips are soft, the press of his mouth tender and lingering.

“No, not there.” 

He pulls back, noses your nose. You let out a long sigh and he does too, your breath mingling; he’s hesitant but restless, his fingers tighten and loosen and tighten again around your waist. 

You put your arms around his neck and your lips against the corner of his mouth. “Kiss me like a real girl,” you whisper.

His breathing backs up. 

“Not like I’m your sister. You’ve kissed girls, right?”

He blinks, licks his lips. He looks in your eyes. Nods.

You pull one of his long-fingered, big-boy hands off your waist. You curve his palm around your breast. He gasps.

“It’s okay,” you whisper, brushing his lips with your own. “I want you to.”

“But---”

“Shhhh.”

He pushes his lips into yours, moans into the rush of your breath; his lips are chilly at the edges but hot and wet inside, so soft, and underneath that they’re a hundred percent taut and striving muscle. His tongue fills your mouth.

He holds on to your face but it’s the tight cage of his fingers and the way it makes you soft, how you offer up cheekbones and a swoon that pulls the real hunger out of him: half-groaning and half-growling, he kisses your neck, his devouring mouth leaving a wet trail. 

One frantic hand shoves down the front of your panties. You grab his wrist. Two of his fingers slide into you, his thick knuckles curving. The stretched rim of your pussy quivers and burns. His palm presses into your clit. You gasp, cry out.

“You done this before?”

You shake your head.

“Didn’t think so.” He smiles a little, lowers his voice. “You’re so tight.”

Your face flames in the hesitant dark. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” he breathes, flashes teeth in a brief smile. “I like it.” He strokes his fingers in and out. Bites his lip. Studies your face. “Do you?”

It aches, dull and sullen, but your clit pulses hard and your pussy grips the slow intrusive slide of his fingers. You bite your lip. Nod.

He grins. “Want me to eat you out?”

“Just how far have you gotten?”

“Just oral.”

“Wow!”

“How about you?”

“Just, like...feeling up and kissing. Over the clothes. No one’s seen me naked. Except you.”

He smirks, pulls his fingers out. “Good.”

“Why good?”

He looks back over his shoulder. “I guess I like the idea of being the first?”

“Well I don’t know how I feel about not,” you say, following him. “Being the first, I mean.”

He sits on your bed. He tilts his head. “Are you jealous?”

“Maybe.” You hug yourself. “A little.” You walk closer. “I didn’t think...well, it never occurred to me to imagine it. You doing stuff with girls. Other girls. Not beyond kissing, I was pretty sure you’d done that.” You shrug, roll your eyes. “Everyone has.”

His face softens. He holds out his hands. “You’re beautiful,” he whispers.

You reach out, take them. Your fingers intertwine. “I’m jealous,” you whisper back.

“I only thought of you.”

Goosebumps ripple down the backs of your arms. “Don’t,” you half-whisper, shivering. “Don’t lie.”

He pulls you close. “I’m not.”

You look down into his face. Weak light from the window crawls over his skin, pushed by ripples of rain; it blackens his eyes. His mouth is plumped, flushed, wet.

“I can’t believe you,” you whisper.

“I had them because I couldn’t have you,” he whispers back.

An image fills your mind’s eye, a disheveled party held in some derelict place, a ruin. Bonfire light and chilly ground soaked with cheap wine. There’s fog. Some of the kids have cars, are old enough for that; the Miles in this scene shifts from second to second, he’s a spindly fifteen year old with a porcelain doll face and then he’s longer and broader, sixteen with his thickening jaw and sharpening cheekbones, a thin moustache shadow hanging over his top lip like a fleeting bird-shadow. Firefight hollows his eyes, polishes his hair. It gilds the turns and hollows beneath his icy skin.

There’s a girl. She’s beside him, a bottle of something alcoholic in her hand; your mind makes her change too, first she's plump and blonde, then copper-skinned with cornrows, then she’s an even plumper redhead resembling a girl you saw downtown once in tight booty cutoffs with big round titties jiggling underneath a spaghetti strap top---you remember Miles looking at her, watching her, that she was tall, that she had comic book boom-boom curves. She had an ice cream cone and a sunburn on her shoulders. Her hair piled up in a big frizzy bun.

The image locks into place with this girl, the redhead, because it’s too easy to imagine his elegant hands wrapped around cantaloupe-sized breasts, her pink nipples popping, this body that's lush and pearly and smoother than your own, a classic painting, a garbage-girl odalisque, a trailer park Titian grown luscious and randy on microwaved food and gas station fruit pies; maybe she’s old enough to buy the booze, this is an actual woman tonguing your brother’s tongue, her shirt off and tossed in the dirt. Her knees spread. His long hand buried in the crotch of those faded blue cutoffs.

_Did she come? Did she moan out his name?_

Your throat pangs. Your stomach lurches. Your cunt spasms. You blink, feel dizzy.

“Hey.” He searches your face. “Where’d you go just now?”

“I was thinking about you with other girls, my imagination, it…”

He shakes his head. “Stop.”

“But I can’t help it,” you whisper.

“C’mere.” He pulls you, curls fingers behind one of your thighs. “Climb up.”

“Miles…”

He palms the back of your knee, tugs it forward. “C’mon.”

“Okay,” you sigh, nodding. “Okay.”

Miles holds his hands out to his sides, watches your face as you climb up onto the edge of the bed. You straddle his lap and as you settle your weight, he cups your buttocks and pulls you closer. 

“How’s that?”

Your hands go to his shoulders. “It’s good,” you half-whisper.

He grips your upper thighs. “Do you feel secure?”

“Yes.” Your eyes sting with tears. “I do.”

“Hey.” He wipes your cheeks with his thumbs. His brows furrow. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” You shake your head, hold your breath; your ribs struggle and you gulp down a wild urge to sob. Air blasts out through your nostrils. “I’m…”

“Shhhh.” He wraps his arms around you, squeezes. “It’s okay.” He rubs your back, whispers your name. He moves loose hair out of your face. “I promise.”

“It’s not...i-it’s not…”

“I’m serious,” he says. “I’ve wanted you since I was old enough to, but…I mean, I know it’s wrong.” His voice drops. “We’re not supposed to be like this, I-I thought you’d be grossed out by me.”

“No! Of course not!”

He watches your face. “I wanted to know what it was like to, you know...do stuff.”

“I could never be grossed out by you!”

“I’m serious, though.” He rests his hands on your waist. “About only wanting you.” He grips your hips, gently shakes you. “Do you believe me?”

You nod, sniffle. Wipe your nose. “I believe you.”

He looks up into your eyes. “You sure?”

“No, but I want to.”

He kisses your cheek. “I guess that’ll have to be enough,” he murmurs.

“Did you…” You lean your forehead into his, pull in a breath. Let it out. “Did you make them come?”

“I’m not really sure.” He shrugs. “I think so.”

Your throat aches. “I’m still jealous, Miles,” you whisper.

“Then I won’t do it again,” he whispers back, hot breath flooding the corner of your mouth. “I promise.”

"Good." You rub the bridge of your nose against his. “You better not.”

“Or what?” He murmurs into your half-open mouth, slides his hands up over your breasts. He pinches your nipples. “What’re you gonna do?”

Your lips twitch through a brief smile and you pull his hands off your breasts. “Put these away?"

“That's not going to happen.” He cups one breast, lifts the nipple into his mouth. He sucks it, lets it pop free, licks the wrinkled skin all around it. “Especially now that I’ve had one of them in my mouth.”

You close your eyes. Your breath quickens. “I want you to make me come.”

He moans, devours your other nipple.

“Please,” you sigh, thread your fingers through his hair.

Miles lifts you up, turns you on your back, goes onto his knees and his arms encircle your thighs; disoriented, your feet kick out and you struggle to rest your heels somewhere. 

His arms tighten. He makes a stern clenched-teeth growling noise and it contradicts the elegant structure of the throat that makes it, a ravenous beast turned loose inside a hollow and marble-slick cathedral; your heart pounds, fills your face with blood. Your guts squirm. Your breath roughens.

Chaotic light scatters across the ceiling. 

He dips his tongue into your brimming slick. 

Thunder booms out over the water. 

You gasp. 

“Is it good?” he whispers.

“Yeah, but it’s…” You lift your head. “Different.” 

“Mmmm.” 

You push the blankets with the heels of your hands. His tongue grazes your clit and you arch your throat. “Your tongue is so soft,” you half-whisper.

He slips two fingers in and up. “So are you,” he half-whispers back.

Your back arches too and you whimper through your nose. “Fuck,” you whisper.

“I love doing this to you." He sounds less like a boy and more like a man, his voice graveled with well-preserved secrets. "You want it so much.” 

There’s a rushing wave of heat and it’s dizzying.

“I’ve never gotten anyone this wet before.”

He licks harder and you cry out; your skin prickles all over with sweat, your muscles clenching and then quivering, clenching and then quivering. Your blood pounds. You get tighter, more swollen. His fingers slide in and out. You moan, flood his mouth. Your legs shake and he licks faster and you rock your hips up into the soft labor of his tongue.

“Yeah, that’s it."

You whimper, lift your head off the bed.

"You’re close, baby, aren’t you?”

You reach down, caress the top of his head. Breathe harder. Nod.

“Good,” he whispers.

The throbbing quickens into a bright trembling Your breath shivers; your eyes squeeze shut. Your body meets a red threshold, strings out across a burning wave of tension; it falls apart, triggers sweet convulsions. 

"Fuck!" Your hands roll into fists. You shudder and shudder. "M-Miles!"

"Yeah.” His thumb presses into the quick hard pulse of your clit. "That's it...come for me, you're so beautiful right now."

You groan out his name.

"Say it again."

You do it through clenched teeth.

"Fuck." His voice breaks.

The drumbeat of your heart softens but doesn't slow, the blood-surge steadying inside your ears. 

In the eye of your mind you see roses. Red ones. A dark red, bloody and purple at the heart, piles of them. Old as the house, dark green and leggy, double-bloomed and velvet-ruffled. They aren’t sweet. 

Swathes of your skin simmer against the still air. You catch your breath. 

The scent of them, not the temperament of their thorns or their wildness, even back then you thought it curious, having been raised on lush rose perfumes and Mother's fussy hybrid teas---those old blooms exuded a mysterious dark spice, faint but lingering, a commanding invitation one needed to be close to them to receive.

You drape a limp hand across your breastbone, feel your ribs rise and fall, rise and fall. 

Even now, every time you get a whiff of them, you try to imagine a time when a fragrance so masculine, when such a contradiction emitted from an elaborate caricature of femininity, might have been the fashion.

Your swollen pussy flutters deep inside, like it's been stuffed full of butterflies.

 _These can go_ . You can see Mrs. Grose in the strong sunlight, wearing her lack of sleep and the clench of her impatience _: there are specimens elsewhere on the property, of course, and those are to be preserved, but these particular plants must go_ . Her ponderous pause. _For they have acquired a disease_.

“Hey.”

You open your eyes.

Miles, his face hanging over yours. His lips wet and red. He smiles.

 _I love you_ , you think, the words climbing out of dark recesses to echo inside themselves, even though you’ve already spoken them aloud. You want to smile back but your breath is becalmed, the corners of your mouth too tired.

“Hey.” He looks in your eyes, caresses your forehead. His eyebrows twitch toward concern. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.” _Mrs. Grose had the rose bushes pulled out after Kate left...I think? How many years ago was that?_ “I’m just...thinking.”

“About what?”

“Roses, you know. The dark ones. Those old climbers, the ones that are kind of all over the place. I keep thinking about them.”

“You mean the ones that smell like cologne?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

You shrug. “Dunno.”

He struggles to maintain eye contact. His voice gets smaller. “You mean the ones where…”

You nod. “Yeah.”

“But…” He recoils. “Why would you think about that?” His face clouds over.“Why right now?” He pushes himself off the bed. His tone tightens. “What the _fuck_?”

“I guess I---I don’t know! I just wanna know some things, like…have some answers.” Heat washes into your blood, lifts it to the surface of your skin. A faint restless terror blooms in your belly, climbs your spine. “Why would you show me something like that?”

“I thought you would want to know the truth if you could, I m-mean...I was tired of being lied to, weren’t you?”

“You knew Quint put her there, right?”

His tight white fists clamp at his sides. “Of _course_ I knew!” he shrieks. “How could I not?”

“Miles.” You sit all the way up. A tremor enters your voice. “Keep your voice down or you’re going to wake our sister, is that what you want?” You track his pacing with your eyes. “Do you want that?”

He tosses his hair, sneers over one shoulder. “You weren’t too worried about waking her up while you were writhing all over this bed, moaning my name.”

“Look.” You blush, pull the sheet over your lap. “I have never asked you this question, not once, I have stayed back, I have stepped around y-your...privacy, or whatever it is, about you and whatever you had going on with Quint.”

His jaw muscles twitch. He turns on his heel, glances at you. His nostrils flare.

“Just because I never said anything about it doesn’t mean I didn’t _see_ it.” You pull in a deep breath, purse your lips, blow it out. Soften your voice. “I thought you missed Dad, so I stayed out of it even though I didn’t like it, I never liked the way he tried to cut you away from us, from _me_ \---"

Miles’s chin trembles. His face tenses.

"I can admit I didn’t like you having a person in your life who could give you things I couldn’t give you, whose only interest was in you.”

He stops, fists pressed into his hips. His eyes fill.

“And if we can do _this_.” You gesture at the rumpled bed, the rain pattering the window, your bare breasts, "I mean...if we can...love each other, if we can fuck---because siblings aren’t supposed to fuck, Miles---goddammit, it’s time for you to tell me about the body underneath the roses.”

The color recedes from his cheeks, dims his lips, and the faint bluish shadows beneath his eyes grow bigger and darker; the flood of his tears magnifies his fragile hollowed skin and you think _he has no peaceful sleep---he's plagued by nightmares---I never really saw it until now---he's been burdened with them for years_. The war between his constant crackling rage and his desire to crumble into a flood of softer emotion wages across his face. It hardens his mouth and softens his cheeks and turns his eyebrows into timid wings.

“If you can stick your tongue in my cunt,” you say, your voice thickening, your heartbeat first quickening and then skipping like a frantic stone across the smooth plane of your breath, “you can tell me why you dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night and made me walk in my bare feet out to the edge of the property so you could dig up her hair, like a...like a dog or something---”

His face twists. He bursts into harsh sobs.

“---and then when _that_ wasn’t enough, you dug down some more just so I could see her face, that she was a real woman, not just a wig or something.” Your stomach shivers, spasms. “I still see her ruined, rotted face in my dreams.” Your breath hiccups. “I still dream about the swarm of ants on her teeth.” 

Miles holds an unsteady hand by his mouth, his wrist loose, his long white fingers bent and shivering.

Your throat spasms. “And the smell.”

He covers his mouth, twists away from you.

“You pulled me out of bed so I could go see that.” You keep your eyes on him. “I want to know why.”

“He made me, he made me do it, I swear---” Miles gulps and looks around, takes an unsteady step back. He wipes his drenched face. “He said she fell.” He looks down and the impending manhood drains out of his voice, leaves behind the high-pitched, breathy hesitation of a young child. “I didn’t hurt h-her, he said she tripped and fell down the stairs and that he’d get in trouble, that if she knew Mom wouldn’t let him be here anymore, so…”

You think _you know Mom was fucking him, right, you know that Dad thought maybe Flora wasn’t his child at all and that he sent her toothbrush to a lab to find out_ but a sudden image in your head bottlenecks the words in your throat: the governess, her name Iris or Lily or something like that, you can’t remember, it was a flower name---you see her sprawled somewhere, her limbs askew on a hard floor, a soft-skinned broken doll leaking blood because its easier to make her into a thing, God knows to Quint all women were things, just toys to be played with, including your own mother---you can smell the urine stink that must’ve happened, the shocking odor of shit, her staring eyes and loose mouth, all that young flesh startled open by death.

And Miles, _your_ Miles, in this picture he’s all small and crouching, shaking, a kicked puppy, an origami boy folded down on the floor next to her, his face pale and soaked with terror.

“He made me help,” Miles whispers.

A flash of anger whites out sight; your guts turn volcanic, your blood goes to steam. Your bones vibrate. Your teeth ache. “You were twelve.”

Miles nods.

“I thought she left, like…” The breath sags out of you and you go weak, slump inside your own skin. “In the middle of the night, her car was gone, all her stuff was gone?”

Miles holds his breath. His eyes well up, spill over; that his reedy body, his anemic flesh, could generate such a flood is astonishing. He wipes his cheeks, his chin. He bites his lip.

“There was even a note,” you half-whisper. “Everyone thought she left.” You blink. “Everyone.”

“He put her car in the lake,” he whispers.

“Did he…” You swallow. “Did he kill her?”

“I think so,” he whispers. “But I don’t know.”

You’re mesmerized by his haunted face. “Did he kill Jessel too?”

He’s mesmerized by your undivided attention. “I think so.”

You puddle the sheet in your hands, lift it up. Press it against your face. 

“He made me do it,” Miles whispers. 

You squeeze your eyes shut.

“I showed you so...so you’d remember to never take Flora there, to that place.” He pulls in a shuddering breath. “I don’t want her anywhere near there.”

You nod, breathe harder.

“I liked Lily.” Miles’s whisper cracks, turns soft and forlorn. “She was nice.”

Tears burn your eyelids, hollow out your nose until all the oxygen is gone; your diaphragm spasms hard and fast. You shake all over, stuff the wadded-up sheet into your mouth, bite down, howl. 

Miles murmurs your name, rushes to the bed. 

Silent, ragged sobs cramp your throat.

“Are you mad at me?”

You shake your head. Fresh tears cauterize swollen lines into your cheeks. You scrub your eyes with handfuls of sheet, wipe your nose. “No.” The word comes out raspy, half-choked. “But I wish I could kill him.”

Miles closes his mouth.

“For doing that to you, no one should ever…” You shake your head. “Have to bear that, to shoulder someone else’s dirty work, that filthy _fucker_...I never liked him and I never got why you thought he was so great but now...now, I fucking hate him.”

His face creases, eyebrows trembling. “But---”

“I fucking _hate_ him, Miles.”

“He wasn’t...it wasn’t like that, I swear.” His voice loses its strength. “I just didn’t want him to go.”

You shake your head, press the heels of your hands into your eye sockets. Your head hits the pillow. Darkness spins and spins and spins, lurches into your stomach; you remember leaving the bay at dawn, your father’s desire to sail played out in your bodies, the way he made you wrestle the harsh salt wind and swelling water until it lingered inside you for days.

You touch your top lip with your tongue, taste a prickle of salt.

Miles climbs onto the bed. He’s breathing hard but he’s stopped crying; he struggles out of his pajamas and writhes his way under the sheet. He puts his arms around you, pulls your back tight against him. “Quint was my friend,” he whispers.

The inside of your head floats. It’s like you’re sweating out the sun. “That is not what friends do.”

He pushes his forehead into your shoulder blade, rubs against you. 

“That is not what friends do, Miles.”

He opens his mouth, places his teeth where your neck and shoulder meet.

“Are you biting me?”

“Not yet,” he murmurs. “But I want to.”

“Why?”

He licks sweat off your skin.

“I don’t want you to.”

He nuzzles you again, his voice soft and plaintive. “Please?”

Your eyes open and you shift inside his arms; they’re tighter than they were, high-strung muscles full of awareness.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he murmurs into your hair. “I just want to.”

You stiffen. “Let me go.”

His breathing runs ragged, in and out of his nose; for a split second his arms tighten. You hold your breath. His muscles unlock, his hands sagging. You wriggle out of his arms.

“You want me to go.” His voice is flat.

You curl up close to the bed. “I’m tired.”

“You’re the one who brought up Lily.” He shoves off the sheet, leaves the bed. “I’d like to remind you that you didn’t have to.”

You grab the pillow, bunch it up. You shove your face into it. Your heart pounds. “Fuck off, Miles.”

He grits his teeth. “Fine.”

His feet slap the floor. He breathes like a collapsing engine. 

The door slams.

You jump.

Moments later, a boom of thunder; it trails off into the noise of beaten drums, distant and dissonant, erratic as the beat of your heart.


	2. 6 July 1996

_Miss Katherine Mandell_

_c/o Woodstock Manor Community Residence_

_3967 Route 212 Lake Hill, NY 12448_

_6 July 1996_

  
  
  


_Dear Kate,_

_We are writing to let you know that we received your last letter 28 June 1996._

_Thank you so much for sending your still-lifes of the manor grounds! Mrs. Grose has gotten them framed for us and Flora has three of them hung up in her room. Miles chose the one of the manor house itself and I chose your close-up of yellow roses. We were glad to hear that you’ve transferred out of the hospital and that your new medications are working. Woodstock Manor is such a beautiful place. It seems cozy and homey, at least a lot more than a hospital ward would be, and the gardens are especially wonderful. Please do continue to send us more paintings. Flora is going to start making paintings too, and sending them to you. We could have Mrs. Grose get them framed first, if you like._

_Our conservator finally signed off on our cars, and we thought you’d want to know that we have been taking Flora for rides around the estate in an attempt to calm her fears about cars in general and car accidents in particular. Flora prefers that I drive because Miles likes to go too fast ( and that’s why Mrs. Stern, our conservator, refused to allow him any sort of sports car though of course he bitterly wanted one) and while at first she was very scared, and we went very slowly, and kept only to the paved roads, she’s relaxed a lot._

_In fact, she’s now calm enough to leave the estate! It took almost a whole month of driving her around to get there, of having her ride a little every day, but we’ve ventured out twice now._

[PHOTOGRAPH #1 is a bleachy thrust of summerlight---off-center, crowded onto a sidewalk grown just a size or two too small for them, three children haloed: a lanky teen boy with a pile of red-gilded black hair and sunglasses obscuring half his face, a crooked yet raw smile baring teeth like a mouthful of wet tiles; he holds up a melting ice cream cone, his long knobby fingers folded tight around the hand of the little girl in the middle who is still soft-faced, a giggle waiting in her cheeks, her eyes squinted into lines; on her other side a teen girl, just as lanky as the boy but with a sealed smile, prim lips set to a demure curve, her long black curls loosened by a gust of wind, one hand on the little girl’s shoulder like an anchor; her amber-gilded eyes track the camera like it’s a predator]

_A week ago we went to Bar Harbor for ice cream, and Flora did great! We walked around, looked in all the storefronts, and the weather was beautiful that day too, sunny and not too hot. Because of the good weather, though, it was crowded, and we worried that she’d feel claustrophobic among all those strangers, but she had a great time, though she was tired later, and went to bed early._

_We had lots of fun, and wished you could’ve been there._

[PHOTOGRAPH #2 is a clear sky background of soft blue with the smooth backs of pink granite boulders holding them up---one teen boy in shorts and sandals cross-legged, his weight of hair sheared sideways by a constant wind, his t-shirt rippling, his big eyes squinted, long fingers negotiating a huge sandwich; one little girl in the foreground and on her feet, her sandwich half-eaten, her face a smear of screeched laughter, the skirt of her dusky pink dress flipped up to show the bottom hems of knee-length shorts; both are oriented towards the camera, their eyes making contact with the lens]

_On the 4th, we drove to Southwest Harbor for lobster rolls and decided to take them to Acadia for a picnic. Flora does not like the sea, never has. She’s never trusted it. It’s pretty enough, especially with the fullness of the sun on its back, and while she does like the look of it, but she won’t even touch a beach with her feet, so we enjoyed perhaps a half hour at the top of Cadillac Mountain before she became too nervous to go on. Because it was a holiday, there was a lot of traffic too. She was afraid of the cliffs, of the road being too crowded._

_So Miles sat in the back with her and held her while I drove us out of the park, and she cried a little, but only a little. By the time we were close to home, she was sleepy. Miles had to carry her inside, carry her up the stairs. We put her to bed, and she had such a long nap that she slept through supper. Mrs. Grose thought perhaps the sun contributed to her sleepiness, because it was a hot day, exceptionally hot, and Flora’s not used to spending so much time outside, or in a sun-filled car. So we let her sleep._

_It’s our plan to take her out again soon. It’s good for her to leave the property, and each time it’s been easier. But next time we’ll stay closer to home, and choose a cloudy day._

_Miles and I are both well. It’s summer now, of course, and we’re all done with school, so we spend a lot of time horseback riding, swimming, and just wandering the grounds._

[PHOTOGRAPH #3 is a flood of cobalt light beneath an unsure but deepening sky, a flare of bright but brittle orange lancing down from out-of-frame to yank two figures out of gathering shadows---a teen boy and a teen girl standing like reflections, long lean arms tight around waists, flank to flank, turned toward one another, hinge-hipped and looking sidelong, floating dock hallway stretching behind into nothing, black glisten of water on the right side of the frame marred by a sleek midnight-blue hull; the boy is taller but it’s by the mere width of a wrist, the mere length of a pinky finger, his lips poutier, his wild hair crawling all over hers, salt-reddened faces wearing different tones of the same bored yet covert expression]

_Once in a while, Miles and I will take Father’s old boat out into the bay, but as I’ve already said, Flora distrusts the sea. She does adore taking the rowboat out onto the lake for picnics, however, and she loves to lie back in the boat’s bottom and watch the stars. We’re planning this year to watch the Perseids in the rowboat, weather permitting. Miles and I hope to persuade her to try going out on the bay for it next year. Our father used to take us out past Little Cranberry, where there’s very little light pollution, to watch the showers but that was back when Flora was too little to join us._

_Miles has taken up the piano again. He still plays his guitar and drums, of course, but since the beginning of summer he has started playing in the evenings, while Mrs. Grose clears the table. She seems to enjoy it as much as we do. The honest truth is, Miss Kate, that Miles hasn’t played the piano since our mother died._

_I like the nostalgia it brings, the fond memories of her eating her dessert or drinking a nightcap while listening, of her smile, but other times all it does is draw a big bold line around her absence. It hurts to imagine her smile when I know that I can't see it, that she’ll never smile again._

_We do hope that you continue to be well, and that you write back soon. Take care._

  
  
  


_With much love,_

_The Fairchilds_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for all the hits & kudos---the comments, too!---y'all are the best


	3. dear diary

_ July 8, 1996 _

  
  


_ Dear diary, _

_ It seems I can stop dreaming about the body underneath the roses. _

_ I don’t know if Mrs. Grose reads this, if she spies on me. I think she does. She’s nosy, she’s always too interested in me, but I don’t care. She knows about the murder. She had those roses torn up, it’s the kind of thing she would do. It’s symbolic, an act of protection. Her entire life has been about keeping this family’s name clean, about making herself into a human shield. _

_ Fine, then. _

_ So, Mrs. Grose, if you  _ _ are _ _ reading:  _

_ I have a few questions.  _

_ Was it you who moved her? Did your husband help you? Does anyone else know? Your adult children, perhaps? I can see it in my mind, you out there on your knees, digging in the dark. Of course it would’ve been practical to wait, to allow her to skeletonize as much as possible. Or were animals a problem? The constant digging, the scattering. Her grave was a shallow one. I can see your hands full of dirty bones, lifting them up, Mr. Grose loading whatever was left of her into cardboard boxes. The boxes going into the bed of the landscaper’s pickup truck, and then...to someone’s boat, perhaps? Cardboard boxes filled with cement, cement blocks hoisted into the sea? _

_ Of course it would never occur to you that I did it. I had the strength for it, if not the motive. But Fairchild girls mean nothing. Worship the son but tolerate the daughters, even Flora, she of the precious family blood. If Mom had birthed a whole stable full of girls, they all would’ve been just purebreds to be coddled, kept soft until the breeding. Nothing we do could ever make us worthy of more, of simple human recognition, let alone place us on Miles’s golden pedestal. _

_ But a pedestal isn’t love, and sometimes love is dangerous. Quint made Miles love him, and then he turned that love into a blade, and used that blade to make him do things. I suppose you knew about that too, more than I did, and I imagine you encouraged it at first, back when it still seemed harmless, when it looked from the outside like Quint was filling a father-shaped hole. Back before the drinking and God knows what else, back before Quint’s unrestrained vulgarity started to rub off. To  _ _ tarnish _ _. _

_ It makes me shake to think it, to write it down, but that’s the truth and the truth gives no fucks. Quint turned a boy’s love into a tool, then a punishment, then a weapon. And you, Mrs. Grose, if you are reading this, you filthy fucking sneak: you didn’t step in until it was too late because whatever Quint was doing to Miles kept Miles away from me, and since that was what you wanted, you looked the other way. Now  _ _ you _ _ get to live with that for the rest of your life. I hope you’ve got a vivid imagination. I hope it haunts you straight to the grave. _

_ I hate him. I want to hate you, Mrs. Grose, but all I can muster up is pity. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to be a scrawny old woman all used up by someone else’s family. I think it’s probably an awful place to be, an old woman alone in a mansion---a home she knows intimately---that isn’t hers, whose only self-esteem came out of cleaning up after and feeding other people’s children. Did you loathe my mother when she came here, a neurotic debutante from an old Nantucket family, and stole my father away from you? _

_ If Quint weren’t already dead, I’d find a way to kill him. I want to make him suffer but I can’t, and whenever I think about it, when my mind takes me there, I feel a crushing weight on my chest. I’m flattened by that murderous urge. A hollowness follows, then a rush of despair, because it’s too late. I can’t save Miles from the memory. I would if I could, but I can’t rescue him from the trauma, can’t take it as my own and carry it even for a single night so that he might know---even if only for a few hours---a peaceful sleep.  _

_ If Quint had lived, Miles would’ve let it slip that I knew about the body. Eventually. Love and liquor would’ve seen it done and...what? Would Quint, feral as a wolf and just as sly, have attempted to enfold me the way he enfolded Miles? To tempt me with liquor and cigarettes and other adult pleasures? Or would he have given in to the glee of getting away with it once, and murdered me too? You, Mrs. Grose, suffered my presence in this house and Quint knew it. He knew you’d want desperately to believe that I met some town boy---a man, even---and ran off with him. It would’ve been easy.  _

_ I’m nothing but a slut, after all.  _

_ Right? _

_ So. _

_ The body. _

_ Shall we talk about it? _

_ How about being a girl startled awake in the middle of the night. Disoriented, Miles’s voice cracked and whispering, distorted with fresh puberty and something else, a thing I couldn’t identify, something much heavier. He terrified me out of sleep. It was a summer a lot like this one, too hot, even the night air rolled you up inside itself until you couldn’t breathe. At first my heartbeat thumped so loud inside my flesh that it smothered all other noise. Then my breath filled my ears, harsh and ragged. I blinked. I swallowed. I shook. _

_ I know you were a girl once, Mrs. Grose.  _

_ So try to imagine being  _ _ this _ _ girl. Me. An orphaned child of trailer trash, a foundling, Mrs. Fairchild’s---the interloper’s---diversion. _

_ Miles was in his pajamas. Rumpled, I think they were white, faded with stripes. Gray or blue, I’m not sure. His hair hadn’t been cut in awhile so there were whole tangled drifts of it. His feet were bare and dirty. He kept shivering, pushing his hair out of his eyes.  _

_ “I need to show you something,” he murmured, his eyes like a statue’s.  _

_ I struggled out of bed and he grabbed my hand. Tugged me out the door. I had no time to find shoes or put them on, to cover myself; I was wearing pajamas too, but they were the skimpy summer cotton ones. I think I’d braided my hair but I’m not sure, I was exhausted, it was hard to pay attention to myself. Remember how much you hated those pajamas? I do. They were the ones with the cotton shorts, they were like running shorts, cut high up on the thighs. Out of some floral print, girlish, with a camisole top to match. My mother bought them. _

_ You thought them too skimpy. Distracting. I could feel your old lady eyes on my nipples, measuring every jiggle.  _

_ Why are you so interested in my body, Mrs. Grose? _

_ We walked through a moon-bright dark in no shoes, our feet too tender, thick clouds of mosquitoes swarming our sweat and climbing into our eyes, our palms slippery but pressed tight together; we became children wandering together in a dark wood. Fairytale twins abandoned to the story, lost in it, tempted out of the light and into the dark not by the firelit image of a witch’s candy house but the promise of a spellbound princess tucked into her bed of dirt---a sleeping beauty who was not, in fact, sleeping. _

_ He cried as he walked. It terrified me, to see Miles weeping his way through the dark. I staggered behind, my mouth stinging with bitterness, our path afloat on moonlight, my leg muscles hot and loose and bobbing along. I tried to talk, but my breath wouldn’t hold still. He pulled me, whimpered when my feet started to slow. _

_ You know the place.  _

_ A field that isn’t a field, it’s an affectation, a slice of land cultivated to feel like a meadow. A wild place pretending with a tree perimeter, a stone building: a shed full of riding mowers, branch saws, golf carts, tillers, spades, hedge clippers, old planters, broken statues, other remnants of landscape work.  _

_ Our mother brought us out there on good weather days, on horseback, back when Flora was too small to walk, to play at picnicking. You’d pack a basket with what Mom called sturdies and dainties, peanut butter and banana or ham and cheese sandwiches, mixed in with finger sandwiches filled with things like watercress and cucumber, or cream cheese and rose petal jam. There would be fresh fruit too, whatever was in season, and cheese and crackers, lemonade sweetened with your handmade lilac syrup. _

_ The frontmost wall of the shed, facing the open field and rising sun, was buried in drifts of old dark red roses. A thicket of them. A bulwark of flowers climbing high like ramparts surrounding a forgotten keep.  _

_ Touch the petals. You’ll find them smooth and slick as skin. _

_ Do you know what Mom said to us? _

_ “It’s like something out of a fairytale, isn’t it?” This with her light but quick laugh, a voice flashing darts of sunlight. “But there’s no Sleeping Beauty in there, I’m afraid.” _

_ Miles dragged me to that field, to that shed, on a hot summer night while my blood popped and bounced off the inside of my blood vessels. I knew, by the tight grip of his fingers and the shimmering tension in his body that I didn’t want to see. Like moths against bright glass, my rapid heartbeats fluttered. _

_ I mean...Sleeping Beauty, Jesus fucking Christ. Quint, that sick fuck,  _ _ of course _ _ he did. Of course Miles told him, of course he drew it out of him with whatever poisonous magic he used on his orphan-wounds, to swindle him out of his allegiance to family; of course he took a child’s innocent memory of his mother and used it to seal a horrible deal. Miles buried her there. It was his choice, a covertly tender gesture eclipsed by a horrible duty foisted upon him by a horrible man  _

[the ink here smears into a blue fade, the lines on the page marred into ragged patches by dried-out teardrops]


	4. the viking beach

\---at that moment, as you glance up, you remember a brief flash of your life before: a ramshackle house in a meadow, woods, a vegetable garden.

Your mother or father had one of those owls perched on a fence post, another under the eaves of a falling-down shed. You think, _they’re for scaring away rodents, who are too dumb to tell the difference between a statue and a predator_.

This memory isn’t words, or even images. It’s a feeling nestled inside the hollow space between your sternum and the spooked gallop of your heart.

A lace of shadows slides over and up the windshield. You squint into dashes of sunlight and take a hand off the wheel, touch the sweat-damp skin over your breastbone. It’s hot. The car windows are open.

You listen to the hum of your tires over the smooth asphalt. Gusts of wind come from the sea, gasp through the thick pines with a heavy whoosh; it’s different from the way deciduous leaves make a wind into a roar---that feeling, it skates around the edges of words. It reminds you of sudden shade, that coolness sliding across the agitation of overheated skin, but there’s also a subtle pressure like the drop before a big thunderstorm, that soft swelling press on the blood. There’s a sense of green in this memory, verdant and vigorous but dark. Bitter. Dripping.

Your mother---the new one, not the old one---spent years shaping you into a feminine reflection of her only son: willowy and pale, hair like a hedge of sweet roses, dark eyes that come alive in moonlight. Try as you might, you can’t remember much of your old mother, the flesh and blood that grew you; you’re trained to think of it that way, a mother that is soil, your existence an offshoot formed by roots and rain.

But then, you were harvested by fire.

Taken to market.

If your first mother was the soil that grew you, your second was your cultivator. Selected for traits and carried by hands instead of a womb, she sang to your reaching and filled your mouth with water. She praised your blooming, let in the sun, manicured all of your ambitions.

_When’s the last time I was this far from home?_

You drive inland, turn your back to the sea. All around you fallow fields open up, middle-aged crops; more maples and oaks appear. The houses come apart a little more, the road breaks down a little more. More than twenty or so miles inland and Maine’s poverty bedrock backbone peeks through in yards full of junk, moldering houses left to rot into the ground, ramshackle trailers parked at the ends of dirt roads, dead cars, rusted-out farm equipment.

_Was it with Kate, back before she had to leave?_

You remember a trip with her along a winding coastal road, simple lunches bought out of a rare seafood restaurant still open so late in the fall; you in the front seat, Miles plugged into a Walkman in the back and staring out the window, the scenery moving. How you felt queasy, that it had been a long time since you rode in the car, windows cracked, a brisk chill calming your sweat and your eyes packed too-full of the coast’s hard white brittle autumn sunshine. You squinted at blue water. Constant forward motion lulled your bones into a thick-headed exhaustion.

As she navigated the winding road, Kate talked about a Viking coin found at one of the remote beaches; she showed you a photo of it before leaving, a small thing on a white background half-corroded into something like ash, wavy shapes discernible, something that might’ve been a stylized human profile or a dragon’s head.

_It’s evidence_ , she’d said, _of trade at least, or of Norse presence here hundreds of years before any English settlers_.

It was a three-hour drive to get to this beach, and once there, she had parked in a tiny gravel parking lot before making both of you climb down over wave-rounded rocks to point out the location of the find.

_It was a boy here with his parents who found it_ , she’d said, the cold air biting her cheeks red, her lips flushed, her quick puffs of breath sketching thin clouds in the mist. _Imagine being that boy, who was just playing by himself with shells and stones and pretending to be a contractor or a merman or general when he accidentally found a piece of history_.

Miles, miserable and shivering, narrow shoulders hunched, his hands stuffed deep into his coat pockets, had nodded once. You had climbed closer, squatted; when you poked through the ground, all you saw was gravel, bigger rocks and smaller ones, barnacles crusting everything, dead seaweed, shattered bits of shell---and then came a veneer of new understanding, a brightening, the scintillation of possibility on top of a heavy knowledge that secrets lie everywhere and that ‘evidence’ is just a fancy word for revelation: no matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing, you’re always passing through parts of a hidden world.

You did as Kate asked. You squatted there and imagined yourself on this beach, on any beach. Listening to the waves and minding your business, satisfying various idle curiosities, your fingers punch through the skin of the land and find---what?

In the offered fantasy, it’s a half-rotted coin, but in your own fantasy it can be anything: a bit of jewelry perhaps, a lost wedding ring, someone’s cameo, a gemstone earring missing its mate. Or it can be a thing even more ancient than a Norseman’s dropped coin: an arrowhead, a shard of pottery, a carved bear tooth, a bead made out of bone. But even back then, on a more innocent day, in a more guileless time, your mind whispered a third option: a finger bone, a vertebra, one of those little odd-shaped bones that make up a hand or foot, loosened from its flesh encasement by decay and deposited by---what?

A seagull or a tide, a suicide, a heart attack happening miles away---a solitary tragedy---from any sort of human companionship.

_Or a murder_.

The place you started life in---not the place where you were born, you were born in Ellsworth, that’s what it says on your birth certificate, which you dug out of Mrs. Fairchild’s desk after she died---is a long drive too; it’s not as long as the trip to the Viking beach, but it’s close.

Deep in the Maine woods.

You pass through potato fields to get there, corn fields too, big barns with their swathes of pasture reeking of animal shit, Christmas tree farms, chunks of empty land clotted up and tangled over with trashwood. Old-growth woods fade in, enfold the road; bright summer sunlight greens itself through thick stands of sugar maple, buries the patched-up pavement in dappled shade. The land loses its mild character, gentle slopes giving way to steep hills like rolling waves or the backs of sleeping animals and a shadow of humpbacked mountains on the horizon, wrapped at their stony tops in gray haze.

You remember what Dawn, your former social worker, told you on the phone: _it’s on the right-hand side, it’s a couple acres sliced right out of the woods and there used to be a split-rail fence running interference between the land proper and a ditch full of wild daylilies but I have no idea what’s there now_.

You don’t remember these details.

A smell of wet pine and cold water, of rotting leaves, a mushroom scent like a musty old stone basement, split wood, burning hickory, a scratchy wool blanket made up of bright Native American zigzags; when you try to dredge up memories, these bits float around inside a big open mental space, motes in a sunbeam or sparks flaring to life before spiralling back into the black. Growing up beside the coast, you would know all the different sounds of rain in your sleep; sometimes, when you think about this old place, when you want to remember where it was that you began, you feel a boom of thunder vibrate around your heart.

You drive past an open space in the trees. Your stomach lurches. Your sweat turns cold but there’s a house there, a small one, a single-story shade of lemon cream tucked into its yard of wild blue lupines.

_Maybe I should go home_.

A mile or so further down and another space opens up. This one’s much bigger, packed with hip-high grasses, milkweed plants, blue chicory, drifts of white clover, wild daisies. There’s an apple tree too, old and twisted, the rough-barked branches studded in berry-sized green apples; half of it looks pruned away, white wounds left to gape through the bark.

_That’s it_. You slow down and pull over, the gravel shoulder popping and crunching underneath the slow roll of your tires. _That tree...I remember it, or I remember a_ memory _of it; it’s like a puzzle piece now, strange as a faded photo, but I know there used to be a big branch on that side--I_ feel _that---and there’s something else_.

You turn the car off. Heat piles back in through open windows; it fills the car, loads the interior down with humidity and buzzing insect noise. You pocket the keys, open the door. There’s no traffic here, no distant traffic sounds.

You step out of the car.

On the other side of the road is another open lot of land, this one claimed by a big faded green farmhouse with a sagging porch. Most of its acreage is given over to wild fields, but the area between the house and the road is made up of soft green grass and planted with wild-looking yellow roses, purple iris, a long disciplined swath of fuchsia lupines, and a pair of two-storey lilac bushes. Bright green baskets filled with white petunias, orange-red marigolds, and plumes of tiny cascading blue flowers hang between the porch columns. To the rear of the house is a falling-down barn; in front of it, a well-maintained gravel driveway.

You shade your eyes. There’s no parked car; you try to read a name on the mailbox, but all you see are big black numbers.

You step on the ground. There’s no rush of feeling, of recognition; it’s the same as any field would be under your foot, the ground tough but springy, the long grasses brushing your bare legs, the noise of insects halting at your approach, everywhere a scent of hot green things growing. The sun beats down, reddens your skin. Mrs. Grose’s voice clears its throat in your head, ready to hold forth about ticks, sunscreen, remembering to hydrate, but you shove it back.

_I’m off Fairchild property, you overbearing bitch. Stay there. This is my old life; here there’s no place for you_.

“Excuse me?”

You turn.

“Hi.” A short chubby girl stands on the porch, dressed in old jean shorts and a tank top; her straight straw-colored hair is caught back in a red bandanna. A thick splotch of freckles spans her nose and cheeks. Her lips are pale, thin, held in a wry twist of a grin. Big black sunglasses hide her eyes. “You looking to buy the land or somethin?”

“No.” You blush, shake your head. “I’m not, I---”

“Hey.” She gestures. “That’s a really nice car.”

“Uh...thanks?” You glance at it, see a basic black sedan; it’s sleeker than it could be, its windows tinted the color of a rainy day. “I guess?”

She walks down the stairs, shades her eyes. “How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen.” You take a step sideways. “But I’m almost eighteen.”

“I’m Harriet.” She half-turns, flings a hand at the house. “This is my parents’ house, I go to UMO so I’m home for the summer and I’m twenty, by the way.” She stops at the edge of the lawn, hooks her thumbs in her pockets. Her weight rocks back onto her heels. “So...you’re a seventeen year old, with a brand new Mercedes.” She whistles. “That is not something I see every day.”

“Uh.” You smile, wave. “Hi, Harriet.” You introduce yourself and laugh, you’re overheated, nervous, awkward. “So...I guess you like cars, then?”

“Eh, no...not really.” She shrugs, gives a hard glinting little grin. “Just like...when it’s not a big ole pickup truck, or a piece of shit car all covered with Bondo and dragging a muffler, it kinda stands out.”

“Oh.” You laugh again, startle yourself with it. “I see.” The wind blows hair across your face. You tuck it behind your ears. “Well, I am not here to buy the land. I didn’t even know it was for sale, honestly.”

“Yeah, it has been for years...at least I think so.” She shrugs. “I mean, I assume so.”

“I…” You let out all of your breath, inhale. “There used to be a house here, a long time ago.” You gesture at the old apple tree. “Do you remember it?”

“I think so.” Harriet bounces up on her toes, cranes her neck in the direction of the land. “It burned down, I think.”

“Yeah, it did, it...there was a family, and the fire killed the parents. But it spared their one child.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m the child.” You smile. “This was my parents’ house.”

“Oh! So I guess it’s your land, then?”

“Maybe it is?” You laugh. “I don’t really know?” You giggle and it’s a nervous sound; the heat of the sun seeps under your skin, makes you dizzy. “I went into foster care at five and was adopted at ten, so I don’t know if that’s still true?” You shake your head. “If it can be?”

Harriet shrugs. “Maybe you should ask your lawyer, I guess?”

“I guess.” You shrug one shoulder, half-turn. You measure the perimeter of the land with your eyes. “I could do that.”

“Looks like you lucked out, though, I mean…” Harriet, again, gestures at your car. “You got the whole little orphan Annie deal, right?” She chuckles, shakes her head. “I don’t know too many high school kids with brand-new fancy cars.”

“What?” Your eyebrows go up. “Excuse me?”

“Rich parents.” Harriet nods at your car. “I mean...the old ones were probably poor, right?”

“What? I barely remember them.” Your chest tightens and your face flames. “Maybe they were, probably they were, and yeah, my adopted parents are wealthy, or---well, they _were_ wealthy, because you see my adopted parents _and_ my birth parents are dead, so before you get all drooly over my car or whatever you imagine my fabulous rich life is like, I’d like to say that---yeah, oooh, I’m so lucky, because being orphaned twice fucking rules.”

“Wow, sorry. Shit.” Harriet’s eyebrows flick upwards. She pulls her head back, sounds unbothered. “I was just trying to make conversation, man.”

Sweat breaks out all over your body. Your voice climbs, cracks. “Fuck you!”

“You don’t have to be such a bitch about it, sheez. I _said_ I’m sorry, what else do you want?”

“For you to go fuck yourself.” You stomp back to your car, yank the driver’s side door open. “And go fuck your presumptions, too.” Your eyes blur. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Oh-kay, then.” Harriet backs away, holds her hands up. “Fine.”

You get into the car, slam the door; despite the heat, you roll up the windows and crank on the air conditioning, the engine humming with a soft thrum, quiet like a pile of money sitting somewhere and waiting to be spent.

There’s an urge to lower the window, stick your head out, to bark out angry words, but when you knuckle the water out of your eyes and turn and glance out the window you see that she’s retreated.

“Bitch,” you breathe, gripping the wheel; your guts float inside you, your breath an architecture sagging around them, your belly gone sick and numb and heaving on a sea of ice-cold adrenaline. “Fuck you.”

You put the car in drive, glance over your shoulder.

“ _Fuck you_!”

The car drags a skidding arc across the blacktop. The engine jumps free of its own sense of purring refinement and shoves the car forward, momentum pressing your spine, the tall trees flooding by, your fingers clamped in spite of their own loose trembling joints.

Your ribs ache, your breath torn loose; your heart feels like it’s been punched, like there’s a wound throbbing to life.

Your eyes fill with scalding tears and you blink them out of your eyes and wrestle your own breath, your belly muscles cramping, your cheeks burning with salt, your sinuses swollen with snot.

You pull the car over.

Kill the engine.

You fight to slow your breath but it dissolves into hiccups. Your jaws ache.

Tears spill out of you, a torrent, a whole ocean of them, their thunder buried in a hidden heart place, your lungs beaten up by their surging wind; all around there are only trees and the sound of wind caught in them, a gentle breeze, long grasses rippling in it, bright wildflowers waving in the ditch. Your vertebrae collapse, one at a time, slumping you over until your arms fold across the wheel your forearms cradling your forehead, all of your muscles shaking out their pain, a comforting heat climbing up the walls inside your body; you drench yourself and sob, make pathetic animal sounds, the feeble warbling cries of a too-small thing that has been ripped from the warmth of its mother and led---in ropes, against its will, through agonizing cold---to a place of dying.

Images twist up inside you, hurl themselves at your wounds: Mrs. Fairchild, mother, Mommy, Mom, _mother_ \---her long black curly hair so much like yours, like a soft river of summer night---her black eyes so much like yours, a wine-dark sea---her spicy perfume---the constant gravel at the bottom of her voice, but like a snag, hitting just in the high notes---her fierce body heat---the delicacy of her chin---her long narrow hands covered with dirt, caressing a rose stem---working the knots out of Miles’s hair---buttoning up the back of Flora’s dress---spreading violet jelly into a messy clot of butter on a scone---her tight hugs, her sway rocking your tears to calm---and always her words, their kindness, her eloquence, what her mouth could do to your name, the alchemy of a mother changing a word or a name into something more than gold or rubies, the transmogrification of the mother’s mouth sanctifying a name into something sacred.

You think it over and over again: _i love you mommy, i love you mommy, i love you so much, i miss you, how are we supposed to live, how are we supposed to live without you, how are we supposed to carry all this life alone_

You wrestle open the driver’s side door, sag over the edge; you gag, your throat thick and slimy with puke, the salt on your tongue bitter, the hollow spaces inside of you crowded with a sudden thrashing of frantic wings.

Your breakfast splashes across the pavement.

You wipe your mouth, tremble all over; for a brief dizzying second you fear you might just...slide out of the car, ooze out all over the ground, pass out. Your head pulses with a dull, distant pain.

_I need to go home_.

Bone-deep, it’s a concussive gnawing thirst that booms, reverberates all through your flesh, your blood, your breath; you want to draw that big old rambling manor house, with its cold stone skin and rose bushes, its filmy morning fog, its unloved broken places and its moldering secrets, tight around you like a blanket.

_I need my---_

Crystal-bright flashes stutter through your mind’s eye: bird-boned boy, mop top wrapped in bedclothes and shivering against you at age ten, the two of you in the backseat of Mr. Fairchild’s---father’s---daddy’s toasty-warmed-up car because a nightmare built out of smoke and flames and choking ash woke you with a scream and a quick drive around the property will calm you back to sleep but Miles won’t let you leave the house alone, won’t allow you to enter the dark without him, he wouldn’t be parted from you even back then in those first gasping days when the idea of brother was a lament in a foreign language from a distant country and the idea of sister a strange garment with zipper and buttons and other closures you weren’t sure how to operate and armholes you couldn’t master without mommy’s patient hands; sitting side by side on the edge of mommy’s bed, holding Flora together the day she came home from the hospital; the first day you went to school without him, that emptiness, finding a letter from him hidden under your pillow that night while you were crying; the first time a drunk Mrs. Grose found him wrapped around you, the both of you asleep in your bed, a scarecrow discombobulated by an unkind wind and flung forward, her croaking voice an unkindness of ravens, the night after your parents’ funerals; your hand in his, his body in your arms, his kiss on your skin, the simple smoldering warmth of him always burning, over and over, for years.

_Miles_.

You pull the driver’s side door shut.

_Miles_.

Buckle your seat belt, pause to catch your breath; you’re weak, your body heavy and boneless as an invalid’s. Your eyes burn. Your ribs scream like they’ve been twisted apart, yanked open. Your heart a bruise. Your head overflowing with pain.

_Miles_.

You start the engine.


End file.
